SOURCE: "Edgar Wallace: The Great Storyteller," in The English Review, Vol. LIV, March, 1932, pp. 3114.

Bentley was an English-born journalist and author best known for his detective novel Trent's Last Case (1913). In the following essay, Bentley praises Wallace's storytelling techniques, rendering of dialect, and knowledge of the British working classes

When Edgar Wallace died last month, it was not only the obituary-men and the social diarists who told and annotated the story of his amazing life. The leader-writers, from the Times downwards, swelled the chorus. The chorus of what? Hardly of pure admiration for his literary talent—though that, and nothing else, had made his name. Very few of the choristers, I should think, were thoroughgoing Edgar Wallace "fans." Most of them allowed it, in all delicacy, to appear that they were not. But they wrote in emphatic, and sincere, and kindly appreciation of a literary success that is...